


All the World Drops Dead

by atrees



Category: Life Is Strange (Video Game)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-20
Updated: 2020-06-20
Packaged: 2021-03-03 23:21:45
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 886
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24823750
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/atrees/pseuds/atrees
Summary: In the moonlight Chloe’s naked tattoo strobes like their own post-apocalyptic disco, and Max hugs the jacket closer for something to cling to.
Relationships: Maxine "Max" Caulfield/Chloe Price
Comments: 1
Kudos: 26





	All the World Drops Dead

All the World Drops Dead

At night they step out to watch the tide. The stop is unplanned; the strip of beach tapers forlornly into the darkness, cordoned from the highway by a scraggly fence of barbed wire, and something in the desolation magnetizes the small desolation within themselves.

Chloe parks the truck on the shoulder. The wind lances through them like a hypodermic syringe. November's too cold for swimming and sun tanning and this miserable little corner of California probably hasn't seen visitors for months. The sand is formless, perfect. Celadon waves collide against the rocks in bitter, soul-drenching spray. There's power, Max thinks, in the sea, in storms. Lately she's begun to dream of typhoons.

"Imagine sailing to the end of the world," Chloe says. Cigarette smoke mists her face. "We'll be explorers. Sir Francis Drake. Henry Morgan."

Behind them a car zooms by. Chloe still remembers their childhood heroes, explorers-quasi-pirates. "It's hella cold. Give me your jacket."

"Then I'll be cold, genius."

Later they walk along the shoreline. Holding hands, balanced on invisible railroads, they pare the world down to this slice of infinity: the smell of sulfur and salt. The sickle moon reflected in ripples. Chloe says something, words stolen by the wind. Max remembers another beach, sunset, another Chloe wheeling herself between the breakers.

In the moonlight Chloe's naked tattoo strobes like their own post-apocalyptic disco, and Max hugs the jacket closer for something to cling to.

"I said, I've always wanted to leave Arcadia," Chloe shouts, electric-blue hair streaming with the wind-tossed spray and sand. She looks way more cool than any jobless-highschool-dropout-stoner has a right to be. "But not quite like this."

They drove out of Oregon with the dead hounding their heels. After the destruction, after Joyce's funeral, after the exodus from Arcadia Bay, they craved escape. Too many things to run away from. Max called her parents to tell them she would return home, eventually. Chloe called David to tell him to fuck off.

Max has the two thousand-dollar stipend her scholarship disbursed. Chloe has the three grand Frank, amazingly, returned as thanks for finding Rachel. Between them they have five thousand dollars, a truck, and nothing better to do.

They follow the road that in another time another life Chloe and Rachel might've followed down their dreams to stardom.

"Not with me?" Max says.

"I always knew it would be you."

They make out for a while beneath the shadow of a rock. Perhaps that's the real reason they stopped. The world is quiet here. Max has become intimately familiar with Chloe's taste over the last few days, and the ocean salt adds a secret spice. They'll have sex some time during this roadtrip, probably.

Chloe begins to sob.

"I shouldn't be here." Her head trembles into Max's shoulder, a fibrillating heartbeat. Max's expected this, or something like this – bottle up enough of anything and eventually it'll spill out – and it's awkward holding a girl so much taller than you are. "So many people are dead because of me. My mom…she didn't deserve it! Nobody did! You should've saved them, Max!"

A dozen miles behind them and a million years ago a town dies in one last gasp of rust and driftwood and memories. The Prescotts fell first from their high-rises. Jefferson's brains splattered against the floors. Nobody will rebuild Arcadia Bay like Jericho after-the-fall.

"For you I'd destroy a thousand worlds."

"I'm not worth anything. I'm a fucking loser. I _should_ be dead, Max. Maybe that's the way the universe trims its fuck-ups."

"Fuck the universe," Max says suddenly, viciously. "What right does it have to judge? After it took your father away from you? After it took away your arms and legs? If that's the way it's going to be, it _should_ be destroyed."

Chloe chokes, not quite crying, not quite laughing. Her gaze has such tender amazement that Max is thirteen and shy again. Where's that world vanished to? You don't know how good you got it until it's gone! These days you can only hold that innocence between the clicks of the camera shutter. Sometimes she remembers things nobody else does.

Max says, "A choice you're forced to make is no choice at all."

This kiss tastes even more of salt. A great dark hunger emerges; Max wants to scream into the void until her voice echoes to the opposite shore. This is why some capricious god lent her his power: It's still here, tingling in her right arm. Nascent, uncurling, like stretching a long-used muscle. She can redo it. She can redo anything. Cause a big enough temporal paradox and the whole continent'll sink under.

Hear that, universe?

Chloe presses her into the sand, grainy and desperate and unbelievably perfect.

At length the dark forces them back into the truck. Their lips are kissed so numb that the vent's blast of heat stings. The engine revs to life. The mountains to their left, the Pacific to their right. Big Sur curves so gently you'd swear it cuts straight through the heart of the world.

The radio kicks up a song. The truck rumbles, four thousand pounds of wires and cast iron with the gas mileage of a space rocket, far too flimsy to carry the immense weight of two dreams.


End file.
